Chuck Berry Rockin' 20 Original Recordings DMM 180g Import LP

These classic tracks from Chuck Berry capture the powerful impact Berry had on the pop music of the second half of the 1950's.

Charles Berry was born in 1926 and grew up in the middle-class Ellardsville section of St. Louis, Missouri. He began to take music seriously during his three-year stint in a reform school, for a botched robbery. While in his earlier childhood, Berry had been immersed in a wide variety of r&b, country, and pop, he now began to focus on blues.

Chuck Berry defined the biracial teen-pop style. Whereas in 1955, with "Maybellene" and "Thirty Days," he was singing a grownup music to which teens gravitated, by 1956, with "Roll Over Beethoven," and 1957, with "School Day," he was writing explicitly about teen concerns, celebrating the very pop phenomenon that had enabled his own overwhelming success, and which he played a key roles in creating. The 1958 hit "Sweet Little Sixteen" thus sums up both the mainstream ascent of rock and roll and the career of Chuck Berry as one of rock's founders.